During the "good old days" of speed workouts on the local college tracks, before my rise to coach-dom (coach-dumb?) I gave little or no thought to the ratio or hard efforts to recovery. Well, it wasn't necessarily my job to think about it. That's why I had a coach. That was his job; I trusted him to gauge everything properly.

Over time, I started to look at coach-like stuff such as the right amount of mileage per workout, relative intensities, and my (decreasing as a result of the aging process) ability to recover from workouts. I then began to ask "what is the right ratio of speedwork, consisting of 'fresh,' 'good build-up,' 'good,' and even 'hard' efforts, to running which allows the body to recover?"

First, let me clarify something. There's no such thing as a recovery run. Running takes effort and does a certain degree of damage (muscle microtears and the like) to the body, no matter what pace you do. Recovery comes when the body is NOT running. So we'll replace the term "recovery run" with that of "easy run."

Of course, the ratio of each type of effort isn't etched in stone, but dependent on the individual runner's level of fitness - or tendency toward injury, their ability to recover from hard efforts - a function of fitness level, and race focus. Some coaches, like Arthur Lydiard, were all about the base training first, then adding speed. Others feel the other way around is best; work on speed once the initial race fitness is built, a fast short distance runner can become a fast long-distance runner over time. Once again, each runner is an experiment of one. I like the structure of base-building followed over time with a modicum of speedwork. Older and less-experienced runners will develop speed even as a result of long-term aerobic paced running, but the increases come at a much slower rate.

Still the question presents itself: How much speedwork is good?

Suzanne BowenRegardless of the race distance, all runners will benefit from a degree of speed training. The right amount and the right intensity of speedwork varies from runner to runner.

I first went back to my books to see what Jack Daniels had to say. Daniels earlier plans in his first edition of the Running Formula broke things down into four cycles, for which I won't go into detail. If you want to read it I recommend a copy of his book, either in paperback or on e-reader (the charts in the e-reader version are a little small in print, so make certain you have a magnifier if you get it that way).

I borrowed from Daniels' four sets of six-week training cycles to draw up my training for the next six months leading into a late-May half-marathon.

The first six weeks were mostly easy aerobic-paced runs. Once the second six-week cycle began, I plugged in runs at threshhold (what I used to call "fresh") pace, either as 400-meter, kilometer, or mile repeats with brief recovery periods, or as something Daniels called "cruise intervals," another nice term for tempo runs. Threshhold running, Daniels recommends, should be no more than about ten percent of the training volume. At this point - for me - that's only one speed workout a week.

For what it's worth, I've noticed the difference from when I went from two speed workouts a week to only one. It shows in the way I walk the morning after a workout. Yes, I can walk like the near-fifty-year-old I am, rather than a person twice my age. And I can still clip around the track in the low-90 second range as necessary.

The faster paces Daniels uses to work on VO2max and running efficiency, his "interval" and "repeat" paces, are also only small portions of the total training volume, that of eight percent and five percent, respectively. So, a recreational runner who's running six days a week using any of Daniels' training plans is probably not doing not much more than ten miles a week in speedwork. Three-quarters of the time is spent running at either "easy," "long," or "marathon" pace.

There's a time and a place to work on the speed, but it's probably not as much as we think we need.

Michael Bowen is a running coach/training specialist who lives, trains and coaches in the Pensacola, FL area. He and his wife Suzanne regularly come to New Orleans to participate and volunteer at races and triathlons. He also writes a blog, "If I Were Your Coach."